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The Last Country We "Liberated" from an "Evil" Dictator Is Now Openly Trading Slaves

by Carey Wedler - April 14, 2017

It is widely known that the U.S.-led NATO intervention to topple Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 resulted in a power vacuum that has allowed terror groups like ISIS to gain a foothold in the country.

Despite the destructive consequences of the 2011 invasion, the West is currently taking a similar trajectory with regard to Syria. Just as the Obama administration excoriated Gaddafi in 2011, highlighting his human rights abuses and insisting he must be removed from power to protect the Libyan people, the Trump administration is now pointing to the repressive policies of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and warning his regime will soon come to an end — all in the name of protecting Syrian civilians.

But as the U.S. and its allies fail to produce legal grounds for their recent air strike — let alone provide concrete evidence to back up their claims Assad was responsible for a deadly chemical attack last week — more hazards of invading foreign countries and removing their heads of state are emerging.

This week, new findings revealed another unintended consequence of “humanitarian intervention”: the growth of the human slave trade.

The Guardianreports that while “violence, extortion and slave labor” have been a reality for people trafficked through Libya in the past, the slave trade has recently expanded. Today, people are selling other human beings out in the open.

“The latest reports of ‘slave markets’ for migrants can be added to a long list of outrages [in Libya],” said Mohammed Abdiker, head of operation and emergencies for the International Office of Migration, an intergovernmental organization that promotes “humane and orderly migration for the benefit of all,” according to its website. “The situation is dire. The more IOM engages inside Libya, the more we learn that it is a vale of tears for all too many migrants.”

The North African country is commonly used as a point of exit for refugees fleeing other parts of the continent. But since Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011, “the vast, sparsely populated country has slid into violent chaos and migrants with little cash and usually no papers are particularly vulnerable,” the Guardian explains.

One survivor from Senegal said he was passing through Libya from Niger with a group of other migrants attempting to flee their home countries. They had paid a smuggler to transport them via bus to the coast, where they would risk taking a boat to Europe. But rather than take them to the coast, the smuggler took them to a dusty lot in Sabha, Libya. According to Livia Manente, an IOM officer who interviews survivors, “their driver suddenly said middlemen had not passed on his fees and put his passengers up for sale.”

“Several other migrants confirmed his story, independently describing kinds of slave markets as well as kinds of private prisons all over in Libya,” she said, adding IOM Italy had confirmed similar stories from migrants landing in southern Italy.

The Senegalese survivor said he was taken to a makeshift prison, which the Guardian notes are common in Libya.

“Those held inside are forced to work without pay, or on meager rations, and their captors regularly call family at home demanding a ransom. His captors asked for 300,000 west African francs (about £380), then sold him on to a larger jail where the demand doubled without explanation.”

When migrants were held too long without having a ransom paid for them, they were taken away and killed. “Some wasted away on meager rations in unsanitary conditions, dying of hunger and disease, but overall numbers never fell,” the Guardian reported.

“If the number of migrants goes down, because of death or someone is ransomed, the kidnappers just go to the market and buy one,” Manente said.

Giuseppe Loprete, IOM Niger’s chief of mission, confirmed these disturbing reports. “It’s very clear they see themselves as being treated as slaves,” he said. He arranged for the repatriation of 1,500 migrants just in the first three months of this year and is concerned more stories and incidents will emerge as more migrants return from Libya.

“And conditions are worsening in Libya so I think we can also expect more in the coming months,” he added.

As the United States government continues to entertain regime change in Syria as a viable solution to the many crises in that country, it is becoming ever-more evident that ousting dictators — however detestable they may be — is not effective. Toppling Saddam Hussein led not only to the deaths of civilians and radicalization within the population, but also the rise of ISIS.

5 Years Ago Today, the US Helped Murder Gaddafi to Stop the Creation of Gold-Backed Currency

Five years ago today, the West took it upon itself to use NATO to overthrow Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi — not for any humanitarian threat to civilians as had been repeatedly claimed — but because his planned roll-out of a new currency to be used across Africa posed a palpable existential threat to central banks at the heart of the Western financial and political system.

Long theorized to be the actual vehicle for Gaddafi’s downfall, the gold dinar-based, pan-African currency motive came to light in nascent 2016 in one of more than 3,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails released by the State Department — conveniently timed with the New Year’s holiday to abate outrage or repercussions.

And outrage there should still be — plenty of false posturing in the lead-in to the ultimate overthrow of the Gaddafi regime should sour public trust in the West’s geopolitical motives, as a prime example of embroiling itself in unnecessary conflict every time a nation threatens to gain too much independence.
In March 2011, amid heightening rebellion of the Arab Spring, chaos came to Libya’s second-largest city, Benghazi — and the West and its allies quickly capitalized on those events to partake in a falsely-premised rebellion of its own.

Citing a decades-old U.N. Security Council resolution to invoke a nefarious no-fly zone over Libya to “protect civilians,” the United States, U.K., France, and others began a bombing campaign on March 19 — in actuality, of course, that protection was of the central bank monopoly and, in particular, France’s financial interests in the historically French-colonial region.

“We are doing it to protect the civilian population from the murderous madness of a regime that in killing its own people has lost all legitimacy,”railed French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who played a key role in Gaddafi’s fated demise.

“Colonel Gaddafi has made this happen. He has lied to the international community… He continues to brutalize his own people,” British Prime Minister David Cameron also asserted. “We cannot allow the slaughter of civilians to continue.”

As head of the U.S. State Department, Hillary Clinton intoned the scripted narrative, heralding the intervention in Libya as the need to “protect civilians and it is to provide access for humanitarian assistance.”

In the years leading up to the decision to topple the Libyan government, Gaddafi had made amends for the nation’s terrorism-pockmarked history, even agreeing to abandon and dismantle its chemical and nuclear weapons programs. In fact, Gaddafi so ameliorated Libya’s reputation, the U.S. removed the nation from its state sponsors of terrorism list in 2006.

But all of that was for naught once Gaddafi sought to pivot from central banks for the good of millions of people in Africa.

In the aforementioned memo released by the State Department, longtime Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal wrote the secretary of state on April 2, 2011, under the heading, “France’s client & Qaddafi’s gold,” about several pertinent concerns in the ongoing siege on Libya.

It seemed to Blumenthal toppling Gaddafi might be a more cumbersome task than originally imagined, in part because the leader had “nearly bottomless financial resources to continue indefinitely” combating NATO and allied forces.

Blumenthal wrote:

“On April 2, 2011 sources with access to advisors to Saif al-Islam Qaddafi stated in strictest confidence that while the freezing of Libya’s foreign bank accounts presents Muammar Qaddafi with serious challenges, his ability to equip and maintain his armed forces and intelligence services remains intact. According to sensitive information available to this these individuals, Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli.”

Indeed, the extent of the threat to the West’s central financial monopolies from the gold dinar-backed currency is made astonishingly clear as the now-notorious memorandum continues:

“This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide, the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).

“(Source Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.”

Those unnamed sources cited five major points of concern for Sarkozy over Gaddafi’s innovative plan to escape Western control:

a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,b. Increase French influence in North Africa,

c. Improve his internal political situation in France,d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in,Francophone Africa.)

In what could best be described a gut-wrenching letter — considering the events to follow — Gaddafi, oblivious to the plot, penned a letter on April 6 to President Obama begging for an end to NATO-led airstrikes on Libya.

Addressing the president as “Our son,” referring to Obama’s African heritage, the embattled leader wrote [unusual spellings and errors per original]:

“We have been hurt more morally that physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. We still pray that you continue to be president of the U.S.A. We Endeavour and hope that you will gain victory in the new election campaigne. You are a man who has enough courage to annul a wrong and mistaken action.”

Gaddafi added that “for the sake of economic, and security cooperation against terror, you are in a position to keep Nato off the Libyan affair for good.

“As you know too well democracy and building of civil society cannot be achieved by means of missiles and aircraft, or by backing armed member of AlQuaeda in Benghazi.”

But his plea — as one sent just days before the bombing began, in which Gaddafi insisted, “even if Libya and the United States enter into war,God forbid, you will always remain my son” — fell on purposely, criminally deaf ears.

On October 20, 2011, Gaddafi attempted in vain to flee the city of Sirte — and Libya fell largely under Western-backed rebel and NATO control by the end of the month.

Hillary Clinton’s deplorably merciless reaction, “We came, we saw, he died,” played out in an interview shortly after Gaddafi’s shameful murder.

As per usual, the U.S. and its Western counterparts left the country to its own devices after slashing the once-thriving nation to the ground.

“Today there is no government of Libya. It’s simply mobs that patrol the streets and kill one another,” Virginia State Senator Richard Black told RT of the mess left behind.

And despite certain issues in Libya before the coup, “Libyans had an incredibly high standard of living, the highest in Africa,” international lawyer Francis Boyle toldRT. “When I first went to Libya in 1986, I was amazed by the empowerment of women. What I saw in Libya was that women could do anything they wanted to do.”

Tragically, as has played out repeatedly around the planet, any nation — no matter how functional and successful — will be annihilated by the American empire if it or its allies have sufficient reason.

As Sen. Black noted — as could be of any such nation: “We were willing to absolutely wipe out and crush their civilization.”

The migrant slave trade is booming in Libya. Why is the world ignoring it?

Ross KempI’ve seen the dangerous route to Europe through Libya, with thousands of people at the mercy of cruelty for profit. But our leaders prefer to keep them there

It’s a mass grave that we don’t need the United Nations to verify. Every day an average of 14 migrants, the vast majority from countries in sub-Saharan Africa, die crossing the Mediterranean.

Many more see their European dream turn into a nightmare long before they’re corralled on to flimsy rubber dinghies on Libya’s beaches. They’re the victims of a silent massacre in the Sahara desert – a journey more deadly than the crossing from the coast, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

Come the spring, thousands of migrants and refugees fleeing poverty and violence will die in Libya, but I doubt you’ll hear much about it. Compassion fatigue has set in. The numbers have become too big to comprehend. It’s an old story; we feel numbed by the now familiar news images of men huddled together on boats. Maybe it’s because they’re African and have been written off as “undeserving economic migrants”. These are the people some of our political leaders have in mind when they talk of swarms, plagues and marauders. The understandable focus on Syrian refugees has taken the spotlight away from the more dangerous route to Europe through Libya.

Or maybe it’s because, with three rival governments presiding over anarchy in Libya, and the real power lying in the hands of armed militias, getting inside the country to tell the story is just too difficult and dangerous. One thing is becoming clear – many people have come to see this tragic situation as though it were more a problem for us than for the migrants. We have stopped caring about them. As a documentary-maker, I believe it’s our job to make people care. That was the reason my team and I went to Libya – to try to shine a light on the under-reported plight of migrants away from the coastline and to tell the human stories of the men and women making the journey.

What I saw there is nothing short of a modern-day slave trade, with migrants treated as commodities. It’s as though nothing has changed in the 300 years since desert tribes used the very same routes to bring slaves to north Africa: Nigerian women told they are going to Italy to work as housemaids only to be trafficked into desert brothels with no idea when they might leave, young men cruelly beaten and held captive for months until their families pay a ransom, women forced to take contraception to stop themselves becoming pregnant at the hands of smugglers.

What makes their plight even sadder is that most have no idea what sort of country they’re entering. I saw this when I spoke with men and women at the very start of their journey – dazed and battered from the drive across the desert border with Niger but filled with a naive optimism.

Not only are they at the mercy of people smugglers but also the authorities themselves – in the main, armed militias with no one to hold them to account and few other sources of income apart from the migrant trade. In the desert town of Brak, I met a young man who told me he had no choice but to work for a smuggling ring ferrying migrants to a handover point on the back of a pickup.

While Libyans may rely on their own militias for protection, the migrants have nothing and no one to protect them. When they are intercepted by what authorities do exist in the country, they are taken to squalid, overcrowded warehouses – generously referred to as detention centres. In one centre for women in the coastal town of Surman I met Aisha, a young Nigerian. She was bleeding to death after giving birth to her baby girl on the toilet floor. The child died three days later. Since coming home we have tried but been unable to find out what has happened to Aisha. I fear the worst.

Even in the worst refugee camps in the world there is often food, medical facilities and aid workers to offer support. In the Libyan detention centres, migrants are locked up and left to rot. It’s a humanitarian disaster with barely any humanitarian organisations there to help. For tens of thousands of migrants in the country at the moment, they have no means of escape. Libya doesn’t want them, Europe doesn’t want them and even their own countries don’t want them.

We have a heightened responsibility towards Libya because of the role Britain played in bringing down Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship with no strategy for what was to come next. In the five and a half years since his death, lawlessness and anarchy have created the perfect conditions for people smuggling to thrive.

Last month, EU leaders under pressure to stop the tide of migrants travelling to Europe signed a deal with Libya. Far from helping people escape, this deal is aimed at keeping them there. It’s only one step away from forcibly returning them. Whatever your view on the migrants’ rights, forcing them back into the conditions we know they will experience in Libya is far from a humane solution. Conditions for migrants in the country need to drastically improve and until there is evidence of this, can we really consider the current deal an acceptable solution to such a horrific situation?

Six years after the U.S. helped “moderate rebels” overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, Libya has gone from enjoying the highest standard of living in Africa to a failed state. Sex slavery is rampant, the illegal arms trade has proliferated and ISIS maintains a strong presence.

Today’s Libya is virtually unrecognizable from the Libya of years past. Following the violent ouster of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, things have taken a turn for the worse as the north African nation declines further into failure.

One example of Libya’s steep decline has been the proliferation of the illegal arms trade. In 2014, the United Nations named Libya as the primary source of illegal weapons for 14 different countries, fueling a series of international conflicts. More recently, a new report released by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey has also labeled Libya as an international hotspot for illicit weapon sales, examining thousands of attempted trades.

The Gaddafi regime, prior to losing power, had tightly regulated the domestic arms trade and prevented the illegal sale of weapons. But now, Libya is unable to secure its borders. The weapons market has surged in the years since the 2011 invasion that resulted in Gaddafi’s ouster, as the Libyan government’s weapon stores were looted and quickly fell into the hands of terrorists.

In addition to appearing on online arms markets, weapons from the Gaddafi regime’s arsenal have been found throughout North Africa and the Middle East, particularly in the hands of Daesh (ISIS) militants who are active in Syria and Iraq. Many of these weapons were purchased by the U.S. government and deliberately given to “moderate rebels” in Syria, which – at the time – included the al-Nusra Front, a branch of al-Qaeda that operates in Syria.

In addition, Libya’s geographical location has led to the growth of another illicit industry – sex slavery. With many West African migrants traveling through Libya as they seek passage to Europe, sex slavery has become so commonplace that live slave auctions now occur in plain view of the public, according to a recent statementfrom the International Organization for Migration. Those not sold into slavery are sometimes thrown in private prisons, where they are held until their families make a ransom payment. Those whose families are unable to pay are taken away and killed, while others have reportedly wasted away from a lack of food and other basic necessities.

Libya still lacks a federal government, which has led to the rise of several warring factions, many of them based on tribal affiliations. Some of the more powerful factions include infamous terrorist groups like Daesh, who, according to U.S. intelligence agencies cited by the New York Times, maintain a presence of some 5,000 fighters in the troubled nation.

Libya has also been crippled by constant power blackouts and surging prices for food and other necessities, as well as months of lost salaries for many people who have been put out of work. The situation has deteriorated so much that numerous civilians, many of whom once detested Gaddafi and even fought against his regime in 2011, are lamenting the loss of the nation’s longtime ruler. Tebu Mohammed, a Libyan citizen living in Tripoli, expressed the views of many Libyans when he told the Daily Mail that “Libya died with Gaddafi. We are not a nation anymore.”

Gaddafi’s Libya: prosperous and independent

The current situation in Libya stands in sharp contrast to what things were like under Gaddafi’s rule. Despite his 42-year-long despotic rule, along with his reputation as a “crazy leader,” Libya was once Africa’s most economically successful nation and enjoyed the continent’s highest standard of living, thanks to handsome oil reserves that helped to fill the state’s coffers.

Gaddafi used state money to offer a variety of popular services including free electricity, interest-free loans, grants to newlyweds, legal rights to housing, maternity bonuses for new mothers, free education, 50-percent subsidies on new car purchases and free healthcare. The country’s literacy rate also rose from 25 to 87 percent during his time as its leader. In addition, Gaddafi nationalized Libya’s central bank and kept Libya free of external debt.

However, Gaddafi committed a cardinal sin in the lead-up to his assassination – not against the Libyan people, but against the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. In the early 2000s, Gaddafi had saved up a large amount of gold and planned to introduce a gold-backed pan-African currency based on the Libyan dinar in order to restore economic strength to a continent besieged by neocolonialism. He had planned to start selling Libyan oil using the dinar before the 2011 invasion, a move that would have challenged the petrodollar system – an agreement negotiated in the 1970s where OPEC nations sell their oil in dollars in order to create artificial demand for the currency.

Recently declassified emails from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provided concrete proof that the dinar was a major determining factor in the invasion of Libya. Considering this, it should come as no surprise that the Libyan oil industry, as well as the country’s central bank, were privatized following Gaddafi’s death.

Libya is not the only nation to have been decimated by the U.S. for undermining the dollar’s hegemony. In 2000, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein rejected the petrodollar system and began selling Iraq’s oil in euros. Despite economic sanctions from the U.S. and its allies, Iraq had made millions of dollars as a result of the switch at the time of the 2003 U.S. invasion.

The U.S. made an example of Iraq to show what happens when a country subverts the U.S.’ economic hegemony, doing the same to Libya just 8 years later. With terrorism, slavery and a proliferating illegal arms trade, Libya’s current condition is showing the world what the consequences can be when the U.S.’ superpower status is challenged.

Foreign Secretary shocks Tory activists with risque joke about tourism potential in former Islamic State stronghold

Boris Johnson has prompted outrage after he said a Libyan city could be transformed into the new Dubai once "they clear the dead bodies" away.

The Foreign Secretary’s off-colour comment drew gasps and shocked laughter from the audience at a global trade fringe event at the Conservative conference.

Theresa May was urged to sack him for his latest gaffe, which critics said proved that Mr Johnson - arguably the UK's top diplomat - was not fit to represent Britain on the world stage.

The remarks are the latest in a string of diplomatic blunders by Mr Johnson, coming days after he was ticked off by the British Ambassador to Burma for reciting a colonial poem in the one of the country's most sacred temples.

Asked about a recent trip to the North African country, Mr Johnson said: "It's got real potential and brilliant young people who want to do all sorts of tech.

"There's a group of UK business people actually, I don't know whether you will have come across this, wonderful guys, who want to invest in Sirte on the coast, near where Gaddafi was actually captured and executed, as some of you may have seen.

“They have a got brilliant vision to turn Sirte, with the help of the municipality of Sirte, into the next Dubai.

“The only thing they’ve got to do is clear the dead bodies.”

Mr Johnson then tried to claim there was “an optimism" in the Libyan city, a former Islamic State stronghold, before host Baroness Stroud, a former special adviser to ex-Cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith, said: "Next question."

The Legatum Institute chief executive officer added: "The dead bodies was the move on moment."

Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry condemned the comments as "unbelievably crass, callous and cruel" after thousands of civilians and hundreds of government soldiers were killed when Sirte was captured from the Islamic State less than a year ago.

She said: "For Boris Johnson to treat those deaths as a joke - a mere inconvenience before UK business people can turn the city into a beach resort - is unbelievably crass, callous and cruel.

"If these words came from the business people themselves, it would be considered offensive enough, but for them to come from the Foreign Secretary is simply a disgrace.

"There comes a time when buffoonery needs to stop, because if Boris Johnson thinks the bodies of those brave government soldiers and innocent civilians killed in Sirte are a suitable subject for throwaway humour, he does not belong in the office of Foreign Secretary."

Her concern was echoed by Liberal Democrat deputy leader Jo Swinson, who added: "Diplomacy is a basic requirement for the role of Foreign Secretary.

"This latest unbelievably crass and insensitive comment about an issue of such importance is further proof Boris is not up to the job.

"Theresa May needs to get her house in order and sack him."

Mr Johnson made a two-day visit to Libya in August where he announced Britain would plough £9m into fighting terror and stabilising the country, which has been riven with unrest since Muammar Gaddafi was ousted in 2011